The Sunday Mail
Rtd Brig-Gen Asher Walter Tapfumaneyi
As participants of the liberation struggle who brought about Zimbabwe’s Independence, we are elated with the 36th anniversary of that independence.
We celebrate on behalf of thousands of our colleagues who fell during the war and post-1980.
Zimbabwe was colonised in 1890 when our forebears such as Mbuya Nehanda, Sekuru Kaguvi, Lobengula and Sekuru Chaminuka were defeated by British invasion forces.
Mbuya Nehanda said her bones would rise again and surely they did and brought freedom in 1980.
We fought under the umbrella of Zanu, Zapu, Zipra and Zanla. The ideology was the same, though approaches differed here and there.
We wanted one man one vote, control of our natural resources and women to be equal citizens, not minors.
Zimbabwe has 98 percent literacy; the highest in Africa.
Our ideology empowered the girl child and delivered education to all, and we are now on indigenisation and economic empowerment.
Nobody in his/her right senses would fight indigenous ownership of the means of production and natural resources.
Land reform is also a major deliverable and success.
Our economy performed very well up to the time of land reform.
It was an illusion as those with the reins of the global economy would not attack our economy as long as we did not fulfill our aspirations.
Therefore, we would pretend the economy was performing as long as we remained content with being workers and not owners of our economy.
Our economy came under attack the moment we touched the land, thereby fulfilling the aspirations of the liberation struggle and the majority.
For the past 15-16 years, we have been running on a cash economy with absolutely no balance of payment support, no budgetary and development support.
This has perhaps been the only cash economy in the world over the past 15 years! We have been able to stand due to the resilience of our resource base and the resilience of our people. Any other economy would have collapsed and its leaders apologised to the West.
However, we have withstood the battering of sanctions.
I am no economist: I’m a soldier who is also affected by the performance of our economy just like any other citizen.
When the economy performs well, my life improves and declines when the economy is down.
The economist will crunch numbers and point a finger at this and that, but the overall point is that sanctions have affected this economy badly.
They were tailored to make it scream and then make the people of Zimbabwe rise against their Government. Orchestrators of that plan have failed.
As a war veteran and father, I see there has been an improvement in attitude among our people.
There’s resilience and the will to survive is stronger; that is why your average woman in Zimbabwe will carry the family in the hardest of times.
Women have ventured into cross-border trade and families have stood. They have given their children university education and managed to put food on the table under very difficult conditions.
When we were young, the relationship between families and government and among individual citizens, particularly blacks, was different from what it is now.
The Rhodesian establishment was completely irrelevant to our survival as families.
When hunger crept into our homes, fathers would go out to work and bring a bag of mealie-meal back to their families.Black families were alone, and never had any reference to the Rhodesians as they never treated us as citizens.
We were third-rate, but did not understand the significance of that relationship and its intricacies. That mentality has changed; we now have freedom of expression, freedom of association and other freedoms.
When hunger strikes, there is now a Government to turn to. Even when there is flooding in parts of Zimbabwe, the Government moves in to assist. It’s a fact of Independence that we must celebrate. We are in a protracted struggle.
The forces of imperialism will resist attainment of what we fought for; the resource nationalism we have championed. Now we are pushing the indigenisation policy which was elaborated on by the President a few days ago.
Some blacks have shamefully formed political parties to oppose land reform and economic empowerment. That mentality is intended to fight what we are trying to achieve as a liberated people.
We are now in the second phase of the liberation struggle where we are fighting to free our economy from the tentacles of capitalist imperialism so that we have a voice on the markets, production and other aspects of economic development and growth.
That voice is being denied us.
It will be fought through corruption, sanctions, hostile media, denigrating our leaders and stigmatising them and opposition political parties that are not nationalistic in outlook.
So, we have not yet achieved everything that we set out to achieve. We are still fighting with those we defeated in 1980.
We are happy, though, as war veterans, that from 2000 to 2002, Government took a deliberate step to acquire and re- distribute land to indigenous Zimbabweans.
In 1996, a policy was passed to reserve 20 percent of all acquired land for war veterans.
That policy has been implemented, but some segments of society and Government have been resisting it and some war veterans who got land through this policy are being evicted.
There are counter-plans: Someone from Harare pitches up in a 4×4 truck with a Ministry of Lands official and the war veteran is evicted.
It’s been happening; it’s one of the complaints we get everyday.
We are engaging the Lands Ministry to make sure that does not happen. We deserve a share of the acquired land and that share should be respected. A provision in the War Veterans’ Act says land given to a war veteran is inalienable.
We are now laying the laws, trying to make that provision tighter so that land, whether urban/rural/agricultural given to a war veteran as part of his/her settlement package, is not tempered with under whatever whim or caprice, political or legal.
This (20 percent reservation) is one of the issues we raised during our meeting with the patron.
I noticed people have been saying war veterans want to live for free and so on. No, we don’t want to do that. The law provides for our upkeep; it’s in the Constitution (Section 84).
When you allocate us resources, our philosophy is to go and sweat for those resources through global and local partnerships. In the end, we will become less of a burden to the taxpayer.
If we contribute to economic activity, competing as a group, then we also help the economy grow. Fewer and fewer of us will need to be looked after by Government.
People who criticise us must read the law. There should be no poor war veteran if the law is fully applied.
Don’t blame us. We paid with our blood, you recognised it and wrote it into the Constitution. Is it too much for the nation to look after war veterans?
This is the purpose of our ministry; to make sure our war veterans are well catered for and their livelihoods improve.
We are not alone in this.
Other countries – South Africa, Mozambique, Cambodia and Bosnia-Herzegovina took a leaf from us and applied more resources.
As we go forward, we should improve the performance of our economy, revisit our policy environment from time to time and make ourselves more predictable as an investment destination.
We need to improve productivity on the farms by capitalising agriculture. Mining also needs to improve in terms of revenues and plugging leakages.
It’s not just an extractive enterprise where the money made goes to grow other economies, with little benefit to ours. That is why Government has taken a decision to consolidate the diamond industry, repossessing part of the claims.
About 80 percent of chrome deposits in this country were owned by two companies and were idle. Government is repossessing them to improve productivity.
Zimbabwe has one of the biggest chrome deposits in the world.
There is no student of geology anywhere in the world who will pass his/her degree if he/she doesn’t know the Great Dyke.
Let’s not be divided, but be united in celebration and defending our Zimbabwe.
It’s our Zimbabwe.
Brigadier-General (Retired) Asher Walter Tapfumaneyi is Secretary for Welfare Services for War Veterans, War Collaborators, Former Political Detainees and Restrictees. He shared these views with The Sunday Mail’s Shamiso Yikoniko in Harare last week
